We'd been approaching homeless people all afternoon, badgering them with pesky questions, and it made a refreshing change when one of them decided to come talk to us. The fiftysomething lady locked eyes with photographer Daniel Kramer and me before we even parked Kramer's Sebring convertible, and abandoned her heavily-laden shopping cart on the east side of San Jacinto Street to totter over to us at our parking place on the west side.
As it happened, we were directly under the Pierce Elevated, and Kramer suddenly realized that filming this woman would be problematic. A thousand cars a minute thrumming past at 70 miles per hour, ka-chunk-a-chunking directly overhead, tends to play holy hell with your audio, he pointed out.
Meanwhile, the lady kept coming. She was positively beaming as she reached us. She offered each of us a hand, and we each grabbed ahold and gently eased her up to the sidewalk on our side of the street. I introduced Kramer and myself, told her we were journalists talking to the homeless about their lives and the one possession they owned that they loved most in the world.
And it turned out we needn't have worried about the audio for this particular interview. The smiling lady, a deaf-mute, answered me in sign language. We gave her a couple of bucks and went on our way.
Sadly, it was all too easy to find dozens of people to give us their hard-luck stories. It practically goes without saying, but the homeless are everywhere downtown — they throng San Jacinto Street pretty much from southern Midtown all the way to Buffalo Bayou and beyond, they are all around the vicinity of the downtown library, and many of them line the bayou's banks at Allen's Landing, and many others make their homes near the courthouse complex.
A few weeks back, we got to wondering what those people carried around with them. What was in those shopping carts some of them push around, aside from obvious salable merchandise like recyclable cans? Did many of them have lucky charms? Sentimental mementos of their lives before the streets? Or were they in flight from ownership and its woes? Did some or even most of them subscribe to Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" maxim: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose?"
Some of the homeless we spoke to didn't want to talk at all. Others, like the cheery lady under the Pierce Elevated, couldn't. But most of the people we talked to were only too glad to tell us their stories, even if what many of them considered a prize possession might not actually be a tangible object at all.
As the recent story of Ted Williams, the Columbus, Ohio, beggar with the golden radio voice, reminds us, every person has a story, homeless or not. While none were as obviously gifted as the troubled Williams, who checked into a Padre Island rehab facility last week, here are a few we found on the streets of Houston.
Tim
Picture of girlfriend
A 62-year-old Vietnam vet, dignified, soft-spoken Tim was born in Alabama and raised there and in Missouri and Louisiana. We spoke to him on the loading dock of a decrepit warehouse off Congress near some abandoned railroad tracks.
Many years ago now, he had a wife, a home, a job and three kids. His wife died in 1997, and things slowly fell apart after that. His kids are all grown up now — they range in age from 33 to 47. "They love me still, but I just stay out of their way," he said. "They don't need to see me like this."
Tim pulled from his wallet his favorite thing: a faded, water-damaged snapshot of himself with Leanne, his sometime girlfriend out in the streets. They met at the Beacon downtown about five years ago and still see each other from time to time. "We're both doing pretty bad right now," he said. "But we still get along pretty well."
Billy Temple
Daughter's high school graduation photo
It's hard to believe now, but Allen's Landing was once Houston's very nexus of commerce, a place thronged by sweaty stevedores and dapper, haggling cotton factors. Today all that's left are some neglected monuments to mark the spot where the steamboats once took on great bales of cotton and chugged south towards Galveston and thence to the world.
There are also the ruins of a more recent phenomenon, the hulking remains of what in the 1960s was the Love Street Light Circus, home to many an acid-drenched 13th Floor Elevators happening. Today, Love Street's bayou frontage is a latrine, the stairs of the fire escape are rotting, the windows are broken and pigeons flap from out of the gaping holes.
At a nearby picnic table, we found 54-year-old Billy Temple sharing a bag of hot and spicy pork rinds with a buddy. Though neither appeared to be drunk, a cap to a bottle of Cobra malt liquor rested on the table.
